May 10, 2024
Could a ‘Free Palestine’ truly be free?
Could a ‘Free Palestine’ truly be free?
Philosophically, politically, socially, morally – an Arab Palestine would not be free. Just look at its policies, says the writer.
By YISRAEL MEDAD, MAY 9, 2024, Jerusalem Post
The streets of the West, their college campuses, their public squares and halls of gathering and convening, and their museums and art galleries – all have been resounding regularly recently with the cries, chants and echoes of “Free! Free, Palestine!”
Drums are banged. Streets are clogged. Tents occupy quads. Keffiyehs are waved about. Flags held high. All for the cause of Palestine.
Posters display the words that Nelson Mandela spoke in Pretoria, South Africa, on December 4, 1997, when he said, “our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.” And they are echoed and repeated in a cadence that has the protesters, at times, jumping about ecstatically.
Palestine wouldn’t be the liberal haven they imagine
Jewish anti-Zionists, including IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace, promote an additional slogan, that “Jews won’t be free until Palestinians are free,” creating a symbiotic relationship of supreme intersectionality.
The unfortunate truth for them, however, is that if an Arab Palestine will ever be free, no one in that state will be free.
It is true that the cause of a Free Palestine has grabbed the imagination and enthusiasm of every possible liberal and progressive group and organization. At times, however, some contradictions remain in the campaign that could present, at the minimum, a bit of awkwardness.
For example, how does one demand a ceasefire while shouting “Intifada! Revolution!” at the same time? Then again, pro-Palestine propaganda has rarely been concerned about the rationality of its assertions, not to mention their factual truth.
Do these protesters ever inquire as to the freedoms that will exist in this so-called “Free Palestine”? Have they reviewed its history? Its societal behavior? The ideology of the movements that champion its cause?
According to a May 2 news item in The New York Times, “most of the more than 100 people arrested in the sweep of Hamilton Hall and campus… were women.” As Phyllis Chesler asked in her recent piece in the American Spectator, “why are women in America cheering for Hamas?”
TO HIGHLIGHT the cluelessness that exists, one also could note the photograph snapped at Columbia University by Caitlin Ochs of Reuters. It displays a young woman, keffiyeh-headed, standing among a group of students blocking Butler Library. She is attired in a strapless crop top that bared not only her shoulders and upper chest but her midriff as well. One can only wonder how such fashion would go over not only in Gaza but Ramallah as well.
Western feminism is not a freedom that would flourish in an Arab Palestine; neither is queerism.
Regarding whether that’s true, one should have been able to ask Ahmad Abu Marhia, who lived in Tel Aviv until 2022 after escaping from Judea because he was gay and suffering discrimination. But that’s no longer possible, since his beheaded body was located near Hebron that October.
It was reported at the time that some 90 other Arabs from the Palestinian Authority who identify as LGBT were then living as asylum seekers in Israel. In Israel, to repeat.
Another group calling for a free Arab Palestine are those wishing that their university divest from investments in Israel. Have they any idea what a blow that would be to the health, science and industry advancement that they themselves benefit from?
One of the spokespeople for UCLA protesters added another aspect: “Given that the University of California is founded on colonialism, it’s inherently a violent institution” and therefore is a system linked to both foreign wars.
Is she aware that Arab Palestine itself is a result of an imperialist colonialism? After all, Arabs who came out of Arabia in the 7th century invaded, conquered, occupied and subjugated the Jewish and Christian communities that existed in Byzantine-occupied Judea. They even set about a process of Islamization, too. Is that a basis for freedom?
At New York’s New School, a banner reading “Death to Israel! Death to America! Glory to Palestine!” would seem to be a bit too free with Marxist rhetoric, but is nevertheless indicative of the extreme disconnect-with-reality approach, as well as danger, of those promoting a Free Palestine.
Nerdeen Kiswani of the Within Our Lifetime pro-Palestine group retweeted this message: “We either divest from imperialism or we get fascism. The ruling class is eagerly ushering in fascism at home to defend their fascism abroad.” She doesn’t want to admit that a “Free Palestine” means a very un-free world.
PHILOSOPHICALLY, an Arab Palestine will not be free because it is based on the principle of excluding Jewish national identity and sentiment. It is predicated on a negativism, an outlook of denial. It recalls its historical conquest and occupation and seeks to continue its unjustness, keeping the Jews as an oppressed minority as Jews have been and still are all across the Middle East, with very few exceptions.
Politically, an Arab Palestine will not be free. Neither Fatah nor Hamas are democratic – certainly not the Iranian proxy group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has not held legislative council elections since January 2006 and was himself last elected on January 9, 2005.
The results in any case were rigged and Hamas altered the situation in Gaza by conducting a coup. With Hamas the more powerful force, the first bloodbath to happen in a Free Palestine will be one of an internal civil war.
Socially, the current framework of the Palestinian National Council is one of human rights violations and repression against its own residents. Economically and financially it is an unsustainable polity. Its policies direct all possible funds to terror activities. Reports of embezzlement abound.
Morally, it is based on the false narrative that Jews do not possess any national identity. As a result, Palestinianism is an eliminationist movement that denies Jews any rights other than being a religious group of humans. It engages in genocidal operations, has continuously violated agreements, truces and ceasefires, and will continue to do so.
Can a free Palestine ever be truly free? The answer should be obvious.
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April 3, 2024
The real Arab problem that’s ignored
The real Arab problem that’s ignored
Yisrael Medad, JNS, April 2, 2024
Aaron Gell is a former Habonim camper and a self-described “secular American Jew”. He decided to write “about the questionable legacy of Zionism” and his essay appeared in the New Republic entitled “Has Zionism Lost the Argument?”. Thanks to my reading it, I was reminded of what he termed “the so-called Arab Question”, one, he asserted, that is “conspicuously unasked”.
That Zionists are accused of ignoring the “Arab Question”, and Gell notes the articles that Ahad Ha’Am published in 1891 (his source being Avi Shlaim) to highlight that this failing had been noted 130 years ago, is a staple of anti-Zionist propaganda. Of course, Ahad Ha’Am also wrote about a “Jewish problem” but let’s leave that for another day.
Gell is not upset that that 1891 article, “Truth from Eretz-Yisrael”, has Ahad Ha’Am terming the Arabs “lazy” or that “Arabs do not like to labor much so as to care for the future” or that they are “cunning” and “exploit” the Jews regarding land purchases. That would the type of language that would land Ahad Ha’Am in no small amount of trouble in today’s woke lexicon. It would also undercut Ahad Ha’Am’s moral stature even if that is what he saw just like other things he observed that put Jews in an unkindly light.
Ahad Ha’Am, at that point in time was not the Zionist as Gell perhaps wants him to be seen. He viewed the idea and practicality of the ingathering of Jews in Palestine withy little enthusiasm, considering it a messianic ideal rather unfeasible. He actively sought out negativities on his trip. Nevertheless, Gell skirts and avoids any further discussion of the Arab Problem and declines to confront what that problem is and what are the ramifications of it as do most other anti-Israel protestors and activists.
That “Arab Problem” has several components.
In the first instance, over a period of some five years during which the international political and diplomatic foundations for the establishment of the future Jewish state to be reconstituted, between 1917-1922, not one of over 50 countries viewed the Arab residents of the area of historic Palestine as a people deserving a state in the area of the Jewish national homeland.
In fact, there is no mention of an Arab national entity in either the United Kingdom’s 1917 Balfour Declaration, the deliberations of the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference the decision of the 1920 San Remo Conference attended by four Principal Allied Powers of World War I England, France, Italy and Japan, with the United States as observer, and the League of Nations Mandate decision of 1922 adopted by 50 countries. In Palestine, there were Jews and non-Jews.
It is one thing to claim Jews persuaded this or that politician and even bribe them to favor the goals of Zionism. To insist that somehow several hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, Arabs, that is, were completely ignored by dozens of countries due to some Jewish magic is akin to a space-laser belief. In short, no one of any international importance acknowledged an Arab nation called ‘Palestinians’.
In the second instance, the national movement that did develop during the Mandate years and set the underlying character until the current slogan of “from the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free” was non-compromising, rejectionist of any diplomatic resolution and violent to the extreme.
In his seminal 1923 two-part “Iron Wall” essays, Ze’ev Jabotinsky observed,
“it is quite another question whether it is always possible to realise a peaceful aim by peaceful means. For the answer to this question does not depend on our attitude to the Arabs, but entirely on the attitude of the Arabs to us and to Zionism.”
Jabotinsky insisted the Arabs possessed agency and responsibility, elements removed from them in past years. That is a problem as they can always insist on a victimhood and escape any answerability for their own actions.
The Arab violence was both physical and verbal as well as conceptual. The Arab assertion was that Jews had no rights whatsoever in any area of their national homeland, a region they originally demanded be reunited with Syria. Arabs promoted a policy of ethnic cleansing, first killing and expelling Jews from Tel Hai in March 1920, then attempting the same in Jerusalem’s Old City in April 1920, in Jaffa and Petah Tikva in May 1921, in Hebron, Safed, Tiberias, Be’er Tuviah, Hulda and other locations in 1929 including Gaza and on and on throughout the period of 1936-1939 with over 525 Jews murdered, raped and property destroyed.
In 1948, they wiped out the Jewish communities of Kfar Etzion, Revadim, Masu’ot Yitzhak, Ein Tzurim, Atarot, Beit Ha’arava, Neveh Ya’akov, Gaza’s Kfar Darom and others, including the entire Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem’s Old City. And the Hadassah Convoy. Mass murder and ethnic cleansing was the agenda. Yet, soon enough, a change of costume into refugees and gone was the Arab problem.
But they returned to terror and for some seven years, infiltrations for murder, rape and theft were the new problem. Yet, as soon as the 1957 Sinai Campaign was over Arab Fedayeen terror escaped being a problem and Israel’s links with British and French imperialism was the problem for the anti- and the non-Zionists. The same pattern was essentially repeated in 1967. Within weeks, the New Left tore into Israel, conveniently ignoring the Arab problem. A caricature that appeared in a 1967 SNCC pamphlet recently reappeared at Harvard.
To sum up, the Arab problem also is the unwillingness of observers, like Gell and the Jewish groups he writes about, to accept the immoral and vicious conduct of the ‘national struggle’ of the Arabs of Palestine while accepting claims of a parallel conducted Jewish struggle, as if equal in wrongdoings.
As even Anat Kamm commented, in Ha’Aretz (!), reflecting on radical Left infighting in Israel, that their goals for both Israel and the Arabs do not overlap and worse, “the Palestinian nationalist aspiration, which was one of the motives for an incredibly cruel massacre, isn’t equated with “human rights”… anyone who considered themselves a leftist had to choose: either human rights, or Palestinian nationalism.” They could not legitimize such evil behavior.
They needed, Kamm insisted, to make “a significant ideological choice of good over evil” for no “occupation” could justify the slaughter of infants in their beds. She even reminded them of the Kulan feminist movement that was popular among young Tel Aviv women. It turned out, Kamm wrote, “that it had whitewashed a case of sexual assault in a manner that would have caused the organization itself to take to the barricades had it happened somewhere else.”
Benny Morris put it quite well a few days ago: “people always forgive the Palestinians, who don’t take responsibility. “It’s accepted that they are the victim and therefore can do whatever they like.”
Gell, IfNotNow, Jewish Voice for Peace and others abroad, still have not faced that dichotomy and its moral and political ramifications. They knowingly avoid the Arab Problem preferring to besmirch Zionism by focusing on a so-called Jewish Problem.
For Peter Beinart, in his latest NYTimes “conversation”, the problem is can liberalism and Zionism “continue to coexist for American Jews.” Once again, he prefers misrepresentation. The real problem is Beinart and others leading American Jews to justify the rampant anti-Semitism terrorizing Jews while ignoring the very illiberal and bloody pro-Palestine struggle.
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February 29, 2024
When the US supported Zionist territorial claims
When the US supported Zionist territorial claims – opinion
One could ask Blinken whether “old” settlements are legal or whether it is only “any expansion” of Jewish communities that would be illegal.
By YISRAEL MEDAD JPost FEBRUARY 29, 2024
A diplomatic game of ping-pong is upon us. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has reversed his predecessor Mike Pompeo’s 2019 declaration regarding the legality of Jewish residency communities in the region of Judea and Samaria.
No longer is it United States policy that “the establishment of Israeli civilian settlements in the West Bank is not per se inconsistent with international law.”
On February 23, Blinken announced that “it’s been longstanding US policy under Republican and Democratic administrations alike that new settlements are counterproductive to reaching an enduring peace. They’re also inconsistent with international law.”
Not only did he reach the wrong conclusion, but he also presented his country’s earlier diplomatic positions incorrectly.
Of course, one could ask Blinken whether “old” settlements are legal or whether it is only “any expansion” of Jewish communities that would be illegal. That, however, might trip him up. What could also stump him up is former secretary of state Madeleine Albright’s television interview with Matt Lauer on NBC’s Today show on October 1, 1997. When pressed on the legal aspect of building beyond the Green Line, she admitted, “It’s legal.”
Jewish settlers look while Palestinians protest against the Jewish settlements in the Umm Safa village, in Ramallah, West Bank on July 7, 2023. (credit: FLASH90)Enlrage image
Jewish settlers look while Palestinians protest against the Jewish settlements in the Umm Safa village, in Ramallah, West Bank on July 7, 2023. (credit: FLASH90)
Also, State Department spokesman James Rubin declared on September 17, 1997, that while moving Jews into the Ras al-Amud housing project “is not helpful…we don’t think this is a question of law.”
Fifteen years earlier, in February 1981, president Ronald Reagan stated that the settlements were “not illegal,” despite the infamous 1978 Hansell Memorandum that president Jimmy Carter demanded be formulated.
Sleight of hand
TO TRULY COMPREHEND the State Department’s latest sleight of hand, I would suggest that there is at least one chapter of diplomatic history involving the State Department, the Jewish Agency, and the then-Transjordan entity that could enlighten us on the subject.
The text of the Balfour Declaration of 1917 had been pre-approved by US president Woodrow Wilson, who affirmed “that Palestine should become a Jewish state.” The United States House of Representatives and the Senate adopted resolutions supporting the mandate in 1922. The December 3, 1924, convention signed between Great Britain and the United States also confirmed America’s acknowledgment of the Mandate, which declared the Jewish people’s national home would be established in Palestine.
The borders of that Jewish national home were from the Mediterranean Sea to at least the Jordan River, as fixed by Article 25 of the Mandate. That clause permitted England to “withhold” or “postpone” certain provisions of the Mandate being applied to the territory east of the Jordan River, originally to be included in the Mandate area. Transjordan continued to be administered as part of the Palestine Mandate nonetheless.
The mandate’s Article 6 guaranteed that Jews possessed the right to “close settlement on the land,” a right to be “facilitated and encouraged.” That leaves us with the task of identifying that “land.”
At the time, the Arabs viewed themselves not as “Palestinians,” but as “Southern Syrians,” and demanded, on several representative occasions, “that there should be no separation of the southern part of Lebanon [i.e., the Palestine Mandate territory] from the Syrian country.” Even Yasser Arafat declared over Voice of Palestine on November 18, 1978, that “Palestine is southern Syria, and Syria is northern Palestine.”
ON MAY 25, 1946, Transjordan became the “Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan.” Subsequently, King Abdullah applied for membership in the newly formed United Nations. The Soviet Union vetoed the request as his country was not “fully independent” of British control while British troops remained stationed there.
As for the United States, the documentation indicates that the State Department declined to approve Jordan’s membership based on a legal problem. It was only after Israel was established that Jordan was accepted.
Moreover, America only recognized it as a state in 1949. The State Department’s reasoning was that the Anglo-American Palestine Mandate Convention, mentioned above, permitted the US to delay any unilateral British action to terminate the mandate unless Jews obtained their state as well.
The State Department accepted the Jewish Agency’s claim that Transjordan had been part of the original Palestine Mandate. Since the mandate’s unique purpose was solely to reconstitute the historic Jewish national home, until that was accomplished, no territory could be fully separated from the mandate.
The Palestine Mandate’s territorial conceptualization, linking both statehood and land, was that Jordan could not exist without first resolving the matter of a Jewish national home. The two were intertwined.
Internal State Department deliberations arrived at the conclusion that the original status of Transjordan was territory within the Mandate of Palestine area. As such, the territory east of the Jordan River had the potential to become part of the historic Jewish homeland. A Jewish entity had to be resolved before Jordan could come into being.
Secretary of State James F. Byrnes spoke out against premature recognition of Transjordan and insisted that Jordan’s membership application should not be considered until the question of Palestine as a whole was addressed.
Members of Congress also became involved, introducing resolutions demanding the postponement of any international determination of the status of Transjordan until the future status of Palestine as a whole was determined.
In essence, Jordan’s independence in 1946 was challenged based on the League of Nations 1922 decision that a separate geopolitical entity other than the Jewish national home had not been formed east of the Jordan River. “Jewish Palestine” stretched from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River. In fact, during the General Assembly deliberations on Palestine, there were suggestions to incorporate part of Transjordan’s territory into the proposed Jewish state.
To return to 2024, not only has Blinken erred in reversing Pompeo’s proclamation, but there can be no doubt that Judea and Samaria, lying west of the Jordan River, are territories legally and legitimately proper for Jewish residence and construction.
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MEDAD'S WORDS 